Survival in the Sahel

The fractured region where jihadists vie to extend their reach

- Eromo Egbejule

Among the thousands of refugees who have fled Mali since a jihadist uprising began more than a decade ago, one group is bound together by a grim commonality: their husbands are presumed dead or captured.

Amina (not her real name) is one of them. The 50-year-old's husband was a gendarme who wound up fighting jihadists. In Mbera, a Mauritanian camp across the border housing more than 120,000 refugees, she has had to start life afresh with no idea if her spouse is dead or alive.

"We came here because of conflict, leaving everything behind," she said quietly while sitting among her fellow members of Femme Resource, a group of women who do door-to-door campaigns in the camp to help expectant mothers and combat gender-based violence.

"Many lost their husbands in the war," she added. "We arrived with nothing."

Millions of lives have been upended in the past two decades across the Sahel region - which stretches across a band of countries from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea - because of the actions of terror groups and other violent non-state actors that have proliferated in countries with often weak central governments.

The violence has been fuelled by many factors, including the availability of ammunition and mercenaries that stemmed from the 2011 Nato intervention in Libya.

Concern has been mounting about armed groups extending their reach towards coastal west Africa. Between January 2021 and October 2023, an average of 26 security incidents each month were attributed to jihadists across Benin, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Togo. In January, militants from the al-Qaida-linked Jama'a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM) attacked a military formation in northern Benin, leaving 30 dead.